Pattern In Nature

Natural History Magazine ^ | June 2003 | Scott Camazine

[Condorman]

Now you're being gratuitous. Hardly complimentary to your position, wouldn't you say? I will confine myself to responding to substantiative contributions.

[headsonpikes]

Red Fibonacci cabbage bump.

[tortoise]

Does randomness really exist?

Not in the sense that most people believe. "Random" is more complicated conceptually than most people pretend it is. A deterministic process that is entirely beyond the mathematical predictive limits of what a finite state machine to model will appear "random" to that machine while being deterministic in fact. Even very simple finite state processes can be indiscernable from noise if the output has sufficiently high low-order entropy (see cryptographic PRNGs functions like RC4 for good examples of this).

This has a lot of other important consequences with respect to the nature of our existence.

[Condorman]

Yep, it's a wonderfully diverse world God created isn't it?

I know of no evidence to the contrary, and yours is a position shared by many. But it's the how and the what that fascinates me.

[SpaceBar]

Didn't Stephen Wolfram cover all of this in his book "A New Kind of Science"?

You mean the wiz-kid who wrote mathematica and fancies himself as the 21'st century Isaak Newton by self-proclamation, and claiming original authorship of a concept (CA) that Math/CS double majors have been dabbling with for tweny years? That Wolfram? His book should have been titled "A New Kind of Arrogance".

[monkey]

.

[dhs12345]

It is fascinating isn't it? Quantum mechanics, etc. It has been awhile but I always found it interesting that man has to use statistics to describe the position of a small particle.

And particles behave in an "illogical" way – e.g. tunneling.

I believe our lack of understand is due our frame of reference. Maybe because we live in the forest we can't see the trees.

According to some, the process of perceiving something actually changes it.

[John H K]

People need to get over "Random" as a perjorative.


People respond to the word "Random" emotionally rather than rationally.

I've long thought that people have more terror of "randomness" than anything else.

[John H K]

According to some, the process of perceiving something actually changes it.

It's not merely some theory that "some" believe; it's something that has been experimentally proven over thousands of experiments.

[paulsy]

"pattern in nature"

Interesting. When I attended The Evergreen State College I was in a program called "Patterns in Nature"

[Logical Extinction]

The Times

It was deep into the Last Days when the messages began to appear upon the Matrix.

The virus was raging in Africa, exploding in Asia, and had already killed more Americans than the Vietnam and Korean War combined.

There were an estimated 14,000 new infections a day, but no one knew the real numbers. The virus was sweeping through the human species like wildfire. HIV had broken out of Africa and could now be found in every major population. It was within this cauldron of woe that the messages first appeared.

The internet, at that time, was largely a toy for the bored and lonely. But those were not innocent days. Beneath the mundane ran a tremor of something dark.

Erotica, which had driven the first cyberspace expansion, turned more profane, more degrading and raw. Discussion nodes on the internet filled with anger and derision. Shadows of dark mixed with the light - the Matrix was both the Changer and the Changed.

The First Message

The first message was written in the language of math. A new math that was barely as old as the Matrix itself. It was the math of Chaos - the study of rhythms.

The math of Chaos is rooted in epiphany. A young wunderkind named Mitchell Feigenbaum, while playing with a cheap calculator, sensed something in the the seemingly random flow of numbers. He looked into the very core of our universe, saw something beautiful and changed the world. What Mr. Feigenbaum discovered was an undercurrent of rhythms.

Rhythms in the Chaos. Rhythms that were not only mathematically pure, but that appeared to permeate every aspect of physical existence.

It was as though he had discovered the fingerprints of God. He saw that Chaos was filled with perfect rhythms - too complex for mortal perception.

Perhaps the most startling of these rhythms was the discovery that all orderly systems disintegrate into Chaos in exactly the same way. The locust in Africa - the oil flowing smoothly in a Siberian pipeline - and the drip of water from the tap, all change from order to disorder in exactly the same beautiful dance of math.

The rhythm is so precise that it is expressed in a number (4.669) carried to four decimal places. Fittingly it is called the Feigenbaum Constant.

Other rhythms have acquired similar names. One, which describes a complex dynamic system, is called the Strange Attractor.

While the language of chaos is often oblique, the first message described an ancient rhythm, correctly identified it as a Strange Attractor, and listed several universal criteria with remarkable clarity.

Words deeply rooted in the truth have a special kind of power. The whole of their influence extends beyond the thoughts expressed. Thus it was with the first message. It was called Futures

[HighWheeler]

(and don't tell anyone that we are all the end result of a series of mistakes occurring during the duplication of our ancestor's DNA)

[PatrickHenry]

PING. [This ping list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics. FReepmail me to be added or dropped.]

[sweetjane]

It reminds me of the prime number spiral I saw where numbers are represented by squares and spiraled out to somewhere near 300,000. The primes are colored white and the rest are colored black. The pattern it makes is not perfect, but it's beautiful. It looks like a flower in the center with waves around it.

When I saw it touched me so deeply that I wanted to cry. All I can say is that God is good.

[dhs12345]

I remember the problem in Physics:

If 12 monkeys randomly type on the keyboard (x times per second), how long would it take for them to type Hamlet without errors.

Answer (from memory, been a long time): 10^18 years.

Question: how many successive "mistakes" had to occur to create a "complex" being like a human? Probably not as many as Hamlet in above example. However, a lot if you assume pure randomness.

[dhs12345]

Really fascinating. Thanks! Does it prove that Gods exists without question? No.

But the patterns in nature and our perception of them may be the reason some believe in a "higher being."

[BMCDA]

And particles behave in an "illogical" way – e.g. tunneling.

No, not illogical, only contrary to our experience ;)

[Logical Extinction]

Number of Russians with HIV jumps nearly 10-fold: official

Agence France Presse - November 24, 2003

MOSCOW, Nov 24 (AFP) - The number of HIV-positive Russians has increased nearly ten-fold during the past three years, a top health official said Monday.

"Only 20 per 100,000 Russians were HIV-positive in early 2000 and the rate has increased by nearly 10 times to 180 per 100,000 by November 2003," the Interfax news agency quoted Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the federal center to fight HIV/AIDS, as saying Monday.

In May Pokrovsky said that up to 1.5 million Russians may have the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, although the officially registered figure stands at some 238,000.

He said that some experts in his department estimate that deaths from AIDS may become as numerous as those from car accidents in Russia within a few years.

Most of those infected with the virus are men between 15 and 30 years of age, he said.

Pokrovsky had earlier reported that than 15 percent of Russia's HIV sufferers are in jail.

Experts have long said that Russia has one of the world's fastest growing HIV contamination rates, together with China and India.

[PatrickHenry]

Question: how many successive "mistakes" had to occur to create a "complex" being like a human?

Not a good analogy. The monkeys are typing randomly. Biological systems use pre-existing building blocks, so once something useful exists, it doesn't have to be re-invented. Eventually, you get a lot of pre-fab parts that can get assembled together, so to speak. To make the monkey example analogous, they'd have to be able to keep good sentences, so they could be re-used. That would cut down the time required dramatically.

[visualops]

THE POWER OF FRACTALS